


Gifts

by Zigzagwanderer



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Happy Ending, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Swearing, mentions of illness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:34:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21886753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zigzagwanderer/pseuds/Zigzagwanderer
Summary: I tried to write a story with Antagonism, Competence and Thrills mixed into the Kylux! I hope it's ok!
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Kylo Ren
Comments: 20
Kudos: 43
Collections: Kylux Fanworks Secret Santa 2019





	Gifts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [theoneandonlyzoom](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theoneandonlyzoom/gifts).



1.  
“What d’you mean, gone?”

Hux has finally run, so someone is saying, through the fog of Ren’s ever-healing bruises and battle fatigue.

 _“It means that the General has deserted, one would assume, unless one was a complete idiot.”_

Ren’s yawn echoes. He would consider it a favour, if High Command would just let the asshole go sulk somewhere for a while. He’s done it before. He always comes back. Paler. Thinner. Resigned.

Until the next time.  


_“…no doubt the traitor Hux has camouflaged his trail masterfully, and, given his flair for soldiering, those who attempt to hunt him down face almost certain extinction.”_

The messenger droid drones on, spurting out static across Ren’s sleep-sprawled nakedness. 

Bombast. Stroking sparks on skin; pleasure, pain. Ren is reminded so strongly of Hux that he shivers and sits up, pushing the droid aside. 

It’s an old, expendable model, because this isn’t the kind of bad news you bestow upon the Supreme Leader in person, and whoever the fuck is in charge of the whole shit-show at this particular point in time, is as scared of Ren’s rage as they are smug about thinking that they own it. 

Ren stumbles from his planet-sized bed. 

He had, in truth, just been wondering why Hux wasn’t there to fuck him awake, or nag him back to sleep. 

But then, the Order is on the brink of supernova, after Crait, and all is chaos, only contained by the gravitational strength of its own internal hierarchies and helixing regulations.

Perhaps he’s dreaming the droid. Perhaps the droid is dreaming him.

He goes off to piss in private. 

At least fetching Hux back will be a break from the drudgery of oppression and annihilation.

In the refresher, he fingers one old scar in particular, one that rides the ridge of one shoulder, and spills himself, gasping, down the drain. 

At least fetching Hux back will be _easy_ , because one time, after Hux had lost his temper and slapped Ren around for getting himself captured _again_ , he had finally cut Ren open with his favourite knife, pushed the unofficial locator chip in, and then licked the wound clean until Ren nearly came from that alone. 

Then Hux had handed over the blade, and Ren had surprised the universe itself by actually reciprocating the ritual. 

Afterwards, neither seemed inclined to dress, or use bacta, so now Hux and Ren wear one another’s scars beneath their separate uniforms.

And not very much else, whenever they’re alone. 

“So,” he says, eventually. “What am I to do with Hux? When I find him?” 

“If you find him,” the droid taunts, and spits something out. 

The chip is bloody, from where Hux has excised it. 

Ren catches it, then goes very, very still. 

Of course, he always knew that it meant nothing, the exchange of locators.

An act of mutual mistrust, at most. Not a promise, between sweethearts. Not protection. Not possession. 

“When I find him,” Ren repeats. There is a burn like blaster-fire in his chest. The world shimmers a little. He is used to betrayal, but unused to begging for a boon. “Can you please give him to me? To destroy?”

 _“Seeing as you ask so nicely,_ ” the piece of junk purrs out its permission. _“You may certainly try.”_

2.  
Ren cuts off his hair and leaves his mask and cloak behind. He drinks in the really shitty cantina which is closest to the dockside, yet furthest away from the turrets of their base. 

It is the sweet spot for shadow-trades. 

Hux called it that once, saying the words wistfully as he stared down from his lofty viewport, slicked-back and tightly-laced. Ren was amused. Hux clearly felt wasted up there, in command of the greatest military force the galaxy has ever known. 

Ren pleads for a third carafe of whatever they’re giving him, and whinges and complains, loudly. 

Easy enough, to disguise professional disappointment as personal hurt, to let the vinegary words come vomiting out of him, to be wiped up by the many augmented arms of the bartender. 

“I don’t even like redheads,” Ren confides, sullenly, to anyone who will listen. 

The scraggy trees are shedding their leaves outside. The white trifoliates spiral like snow caught in the sodium lighting of the shipping piers. He thinks of Hux, saving him from the cold. From stagnation. And sometimes, from himself.

But his elbow is being nudged; the bait has been taken.

“Funny you should say that.” The eavesdropping spicehead is chatty. By the stench of him and his missing teeth he must have fewer friends even than Ren. “Slavers plucked a right rosy prize from this very tavern, only last night, you’d be cheered to know.” His ulcerated tongue licks around the memory, hungrily. “Lovely male it was, with silky white skin and hair like the mane of a magma-lion. Wouldn’t mind someone buying me one like that, to keep chained up and open wide for my pleasure.” 

Ren keeps his unclouded eyes down. His mother always said that they betrayed him. 

“Are there flesh-sales held near here, then?”

The addict leers. “Not this close to the base. The traffickers drugged this one up for the long haul, off-world.”

Ren cannot help but ask. “And did they…damage this specimen you speak of, in the taking?” 

The spicehead hasn’t noticed that Ren does not appear to be so very goddamned drunk anymore. 

“Oh no, he wasn’t broken,” the man grins, and it is a nasty smile, and his very last one, as it happens. “That’ll be the job of his new owners.” 

3.  
It isn’t that Ren can’t use his glorious endowments, his magnificent powers, to find Hux. 

It’s only that when he finally kills the asshole, he doesn’t want to be given that particular gleam from those bright green eyes, the one that pities Ren for being a magician, a wizard with a poor bag of tricks at that. 

Ren takes off his gloves and hacks an orbiting communications hub, filtering for criminal transmissions.

Then he infects the inventory of Hux’s command ship; the answering diagnostic sweep lights up any anomalies in the supply logs, even those that have been covered up, as if they were stars in the infinite black. 

Ren’s technical skills are unrefined, but useful. They are half of his inheritance; they are those of a smuggler’s son.

He sits back and balances Hux’s abandoned locator on his knee. He’s long since sucked off the red.

Sedative-suppressants are among the things which are missing from the destroyer’s medical supplies. The kind they dose troopers with so that they cannot be tranquilised and therefore taken by the enemy for live interrogation. 

So, no matter what they’ve given him, Hux may look like a sleepy little rockrat, only he fucking well isn’t. 

Ren guesses that he won’t have long to wait, and he doesn’t. All at once illicit messages start relaying the news from one underground enclave to another; one of the cartels just found a bunch of its traffickers floating in space, unceremoniously jettisoned from a vessel which has mysteriously vanished into the outreaches. 

It’s fucking insane, that so-called professional kidnappers have allowed themselves to be utilised by Hux so easily. Unwittingly transporting his traitorous ass far away from the Order, in the most untraceable, clandestine way possible, evading official patrols and guarding him from prying eyes like a precious ruby, and all for no effort or passage-fare on Hux’s part whatsoever.

Ren allows himself one small smile, because you don’t have to like someone to admire them, and then gets straight back to the bloody business of retribution.

4.  
They zigzag for a while, back and forth, planet to planet. 

Hux is stealing identities and ships as if for the fucking sport of it alone. 

Ren gives the devil his due; nothing is given, out here, these days. There’s no goddamn appetite anymore for altruism, no asylum or aid or alms. The imperialists and rebels both have seen to that, with their endless demands and obsecrations.

Hux is having to work for his freedom. 

He bribes and he seduces and he sells, everything but his First Order secrets.

Ren learns all of this because he follows right behind, a dog after a bitch, only losing ground when he second-guesses what he thinks Hux would do next.

Because it would be fatal, to admit that he knows Hux.

Because it would make it much harder to try to hate him.

Then the afternoon comes around when Ren skids his way into a rainforest clearing, so close to catching Hux that when he touches the still-swinging hammock, the sweat is warm upon the silk. 

He puts his fingertips into his mouth. He wants to be inside Hux so badly, tongue and cock, that for a second or two he hardly registers that a departing skybike is writing a smoky adieu across the dripping horizon.

He doesn’t want to leave the leaf-hut. He’s so fucking tired. He turns his head to the open doorway; from what’s left of the exhaust trail, Hux is doubling back along the trade route, heading inwards to the more densely populated heartland systems.

It is goddamn over, as far as Ren is concerned. 

He’s done. 

It’s all bullshit anyway. Hating and loving and living and dying. 

He slogs his way back to his half-submerged fighter and heads off in the diametrically opposite direction. 

Ren has had more than enough of the chase.

5.  
“You found me, then.”

The wind blows shell-shards into the firepit. The fragments turn the flames a salty blue. 

The asshole is sitting with his back to the coastal wall, smoking one of the local pollen-pipes, stripping grubs from their pods to flavour the spitted meat. 

His hair is a gritty gold, as unkempt as his stubbling jaw. 

“I finally got where you were really heading.” Ren frowns at the rich food and the burning pleasure-dust drifting from Hux’s lips. 

Then just at Hux’s lips.

“I’ve been waiting for you, for days, over in the township.” 

It comes out stupidly adolescent, but then here Hux is, indulging himself, while Ren has been pacing out his loneliness, knotted up in anger and anticipation, wearing the floor of his rented room down to the petrified coral it’s built on. 

“Apologies. Evidently I have spoiled the romantic reunion scene you had planned.” Hux murmurs. He’s wearing a loose shirt and wrinkled kilt. Fine sand frosts his knees and ankles. “I decided to dally by the seaside.” 

He stretches.

Ren ignores the fucking gorgeous curve he makes, and looks around. This is Hux, so there are weapons all about. Many knives. A holstered pair of blasters. A stun-stick, propped against Hux’s dusty landspeeder. Suitably pointy rocks and even their own goddamn hands. 

Ren reasons that it might be better to get this over with, but then sits down next to Hux anyways. 

“It is true that I mentioned this place to you. Long ago,” Hux says, and offers Ren his canteen. “I didn’t think you’d made particular note of that conversation.”

They’d been completely covered in cuts, that time, courtesy of a new anarchist explosive that splintered everything it percussed against. Ren laughed at Hux, who was comically indignant that he hadn’t invented it first. 

After their victory, Ren had pulled Hux to bed. 

Where they had been forced, by their comprehensive and bloody injuries, to be, for once, delicate.

It turned out to be the longest night of Ren’s fucking life. He thought several times that he would go mad from the slow-stoking caresses. The hesitant kisses. The gentleness. The honeyed noises Hux made.

They spent the dark, slowly, between them.

Then realised, as they were talking, quiet and close, perhaps as they had never talked together before, that a simple dose of coagulant would have clotted their wounds right up.

It was too late by then; Ren knew at that moment that his heart was compromised beyond repair. 

“I remember you wittering on about visiting a place as a cadet once, a world of seas, some alive and some ancient-and-unalive. The blue and the yellow of it. That there were cities there, built from the bleached bones of leviathans. That the water sang as it shimmered ashore. That the land itself was but an ocean that had fallen in love with the sun, and in loving something so remote and unforgiving, it had in time forgotten how to be itself, and cried itself dry.”

Ren pauses. “But you’re right. I can hardly remember a thing about that night.”

Hux smiles through the sweet smoke. 

“Come here, Kylo,” he orders softly, “I’ve missed your nonsense terribly.”

And it is, to Ren, nothing less than a benefaction.

6.  
They eat.

Sleep.

Fuck.

Sleep.

Fuck.

Eat.

A sliver of sun reaches up towards the moons, washing over their bodies in indigo gold. 

“I’m dying.” Hux mentions. Ren’s been watching him sketching with ash, all along his wet, bare leg, which has slipped from beneath the blanket. 

A spiral and a star. 

Ren sits up and smudges the pattern between them. 

He thinks that maybe he already knew.

Maybe because he’s already cross-referenced the medicines Hux took from the destroyer, and found out what they do. 

Maybe because he should damn well know a lost cause when he sees one.

Hux runs a fingertip along Ren’s frown. “The rightful legacy of a career creating destruction.”

With that said, he pulls out an injector from his pack and mainlines an analgesic.

It’s the serious shit; Ren has to hold Hux tightly against himself as it reshapes his synapses, or there’s a good fucking chance that Hux will collapse forward and drown, dryly, in the dunes. 

As soon as it stabilizes, Ren spoon-feeds Hux a swallow of breakfast brandy. 

“I have never petitioned you for anything, Kylo.” His hands are shaking, clutched in Ren’s. “But I would ask now that you leave me here to decay in peace.”

It’s a fucking joke. They both know that Hux does not deserve a tranquil end. 

“No.” Ren snorts in reply. “You will live, Hux, because I’ll make you.” He throws a rock at the sea. “Then I can take your treacherous head back to those who will grant me sovereignty, in exchange for such a trophy.” 

“I have been fatally and progressively poisoned by exposure to radioactive military ordnance, you imbecile. My heart is literally broken. I am incurable.” 

“And I am favoured by the Force in ways your small mind cannot comprehend.”

They both scowl and cross their arms. 

Hux is still in Ren’s lap.

It’s a stalemate. 

Right up until some spear-tusked nocturnal nightmare crawls up the beach and attacks them.

There is a reason that the natives do not swim in the tripling moonlight.

There is a reason that High Command fears Hux and Ren when they fight together.

One circles around. One takes the front. 

The gigantic landshark’s pelagic morphology suggests to Ren that it is not vulnerable in the underbelly. Hux shouts out that without Ren’s lightsabre, it’s armouring of scales will be impenetrable; his tone manages to suggest that this is in some way Ren’s fault. 

Ren pins the monster by the stinging tail, parrying blows from its hind legs. Hux avoids the front pincers and feeds the creature his arm, down to the shoulder.  


Ren calls along the bucking, many-finned backbone. “It looks primitive enough to have…”

“…a basal endocranial opening. Yes, and I would be able to locate it if you would but hold the thing down properly.” Hux pushes his hand deeper into the slimy maw, poking around inside for the narrow cortical aperture. 

Ren thinks how fucking _hot_ Hux looks like that.

“The painkillers you took should…”

“…stop me being distracted by the teeth and corrosive stomach acids? Yes, thank you, Kylo.” Hux steadies himself, cosying up to the creature’s snout. “Now,” he mutters back, pointedly, “if only the _external_ irritant would stop bloody well talking…” 

Ren grins and grips harder. 

Hux must’ve pinched off the brain stem connector; the predator drops like a cartilaginous mountain at their feet. 

Hux stumbles backwards, retching, and his arm from wrist to bicep bleeds all over the bedroll.

Ren has a black eye and stands there with at least one rib all but snapped.

But they’re regarding each other happily. To the exclusion of all else. 

As usual, Ren blames it on the adrenaline.

“At least give me a chance to heal your malady,” he turns to rummage in the medikit.

“No.”

“If only for the novelty of it. You’re going to fucking die, either way, so what are you scared of?”

“Fine,” Hux sends up a bored look, as if Ren hadn’t noticed the way he’s struggling to draw in air. “I will enjoy watching you fail, you deluded warlock, if it’s the last thing I do.”

Such disrespect earns Hux a rougher bandaging from Ren than is necessary.

And decidedly fewer kisses.

7.  
There is a certain amount of sacred shit required for the curative ceremony.

A scroll or two. Some kind of artefact.

But the necropolis that Ren attempts to plunder defeats him utterly, from the moment he strides down into its depths, with Hux trailing grudgingly behind.

It’s as goddamn simple as that. 

Because the place is _filthy_ with the Force. Old and amoral and full of tricks. It hurls visions at Ren, and asks questions without words that gut his mind and confuse his conscience. 

It renders his sense of identity down to a single piece of gristle, to something oily and unpalatable, and then makes him eat it. 

He’s howling in hatred and remorse and terror even before he’s aware of being curled on the floor.

The bonedust blinds him. 

“I’ll never find what we need to save you, in here,” Ren babbles. “The riddles are always about knowing what I am, and I can’t answer, even now.” He wants to crawl away, but Hux’s boots are blocking his escape. “I can’t do this.” 

Worst of it is this; his very soul being on trial is nothing new.

Since childhood, his family, tutors, and masters, all of them have put him in peril in this way, have pushed him headlong into the darkness, _requiring_ that he face his fucking fears, over and over again, _requiring_ that he prove his fealty and his faith. 

Hux stares down. His face is set hard in the sepulchral air. 

“What you are,” he says, “is a fool.” 

Ren flinches, but Hux is crouching down over him, tucking the short spikes of damp hair away from his forehead. 

“Because you are _Kylo Ren_ , unique and unexplainable, and you do not have to answer to anyone or anything, especially not to this meddling, self-important, archaic flimflammery they call the Force.” He lifts Ren’s face to his. “And shame on those who have compelled you to think that you must.” 

His clipped voice loses its polish. “I am here, Kylo, by your side, and what you cannot accomplish, I will see to.”

Ren can’t straighten his hunched shoulders yet, but he nods, nonetheless. 

“That’s better.” Hux straightens up with a wince and claps his hands together, matter-of-factly. “Now, I believe we came here to do a spot of grave-robbing?”

And Ren catches Hux’s smile, a bright thing in the shadowy mausoleum, and thinks suddenly and sentimentally of the shark. 

8.  
The monastery is deserted, desiccated, dead.

“Even if you do manage, by some miracle, to give me back my life,” Hux carps weakly in Ren’s ear, “I shall only use your gift against you.” 

Ren just holds Hux tighter, as he carries him through the labyrinthine arroyo cloisters, and accepts the warning in silence. It’s kind of flattering, in its own twisted way.

Someone believing in him. 

The many-eyed gods look down at them from the painted canyon walls. 

What they see is what Ren doesn’t fucking want to; Hux diminishing. 

Ren strides up the steps and drops his burden, bony butt first, on the altar. The stone slab floats above the sulphurous crater where the sacred meteor struck, eons ago. 

He’s taken too goddamn long to locate the temple, even with the map and the ion dispersal detector that Hux prised gleefully out of that old Jedi tomb. 

It hasn’t helped that the smart-mouthed asshole refused point-blank to help with the deciphering, despite his proficiency in code-breaking and meta-languages. 

Refused to help with the navigating, despite being a fucking phenomenal pilot.

It’s almost as if Hux doesn’t want Ren to give him the precious prize of resurrection. 

It’s almost as if Hux knows what it will cost. 

“This is pointless. High Command will never grant that you may rule alone. No more than they ever let us rule together.” Hux goads further, through gritted teeth. 

The atmosphere’s thick, and sticky. Ripe with raw divinity. 

Ren sits cross-legged. 

“Stop.” Hux actually hits him. It’s pretty fucking wonderful, watching Hux struggling with these bothersome things; _emotions_. “Your Force is cruel, and ungenerous. It will demand a sacrifice from you, that I do not want you to give.”

“It’s ok, Hux.” Ren would willingly drink in the venom of Hux’s glare all day, because it’s so deliciously sharp, and green, and so mean that it makes him shiver. 

“I have no wish to be indebted to you,” Hux insists, hoarsely. “I dislike obligations.” 

“Really, I don’t mind.”

Ren’s too occupied to argue properly; he’s pushing and pulling at the energy fluxes, adding and subtracting. Reciprocation. It’s how these bullshit mystical things work.

Everybody, even an ignorant prick like Hux, knows that. 

Which is why the mighty General Hux ran, far and fast, Ren supposes, wonderingly.

To save Ren from himself.

To save Ren from doing something _stupid_.

But because Hux cares that much, Ren’s doing it anyways.

Ren rumples Hux into a weird embrace; Hux flailing about, Ren finishing off his spell.

Their fumbling gets increasingly untidy. Desperate. Fucking _perfect_. 

Ren mouths at Hux’s jutting collarbones. Thumbs his ribs. He can’t get enough, he can never get enough. Even when he’s touching Hux, licking him, pushing at him, he isn’t close enough, can never be close enough. 

“I was so very angry,” Hux bends into Ren so beautifully. “When I realised that you were my only hope.” 

He’s all flush and fever. 

Ren intends to scald himself on every inch of glistening skin.

“Take my head now, back to the Order, say you hunted me down and…”

“Won’t work.” Ren whispers into Hux. 

Giving and receiving. 

“They’d find the sickness in you and say I’d killed you out of mercy.”

Hux bites down on Ren’s lower lip and rubs harder. “You? Merciful? Don’t be ridiculous.”

“You tell me all the fucking time that I’m tactless and unsubtle,” Ren shrugs and it turns into a shudder as Hux whines beneath him. “It’s fucking obvious that I love you.”

The kisses slow and deepen, and Ren gets dizzy.

He’s offered up something valuable, in exchange for something _priceless_. 

“Kylo…”

“Can we just fight about this later?” Ren twists his hips, to bring Hux even more pleasure, and to get him to shut the fuck up. “I hope you brought your blaster. I’m pretty sure we were followed.”

“Bounty hunters, most likely.” Hux pants. Ren watches him teeter on the edge of existence. “Don’t do it, Kylo.”

“Too late, Armitage.” Ren passes through a wall of white. “I already did.”

They hold each other for a while. 

They merge together for a while.

Neither is sure exactly where they are.

Dead. Alive. 

A nomansland, of sorts. 

Hux becomes stronger.

Ren becomes…different.

Ren comes back into himself just as the wickedly weaponised stealth vessel lands on the monastery roof.

“I’m not sure which of us is the bigger fool,” Hux says to him, eventually, as the first of the hired killers starts to shoot. 

9.  
Ren kneels on the quayside. The Force has slipped away from him with no more fuss than it takes to exhale. Turns out it’s a relief, like slipping off a collar that’s been too tight for too many years. 

The suns sizzle the salt from the boardwalk.

He continues to hot-wire a sleek little amphibious V-wing that he caught Hux looking longingly at.

“You missed one of them.” 

He points past Hux with the decoupling pin. Someone’s scoping them out from the escarpment. It’s the tiniest of flashes. Silver against the dense purple of the scrubby vegetation. 

The last assassin. 

For now, anyways. 

Hux saw to the others earlier, allowing Ren some time to…adjust to things.

“One moment.” Hux has been faking reports of their demise. He puts down the holopad and checks the air current and sights across the too-far distance and then slots a spectacular shot through the tangle of trees and barbed wire. 

Ren pretends not to see when the assassin falls forward into the choppy iridescence of the bay. 

“Stop showing off,” he sighs, gesturing for Hux to get into the fucking cockpit so they can leave.

Hux ducks under Ren’s arm. “If you weren’t always so impressed, I daresay I wouldn’t bother.”

They hit the water, heading for fuck knows where. 

The General and the Knight don’t exist anymore.

Hux leans forward to secure the docking bolts and Ren tries not to look at his backside. 

“Should I put this back in?”

Hux turns, ready to give as good as he gets. 

Ren holds out Hux’s locator chip.

“Oh. You mean that.” Hux scratches his beard. Touches where the wound was on his shoulder, once. “I think not.”

There’s a lull. It’s excruciating. Refused, Ren feels like the biggest dumbfuck ever, having assumed that they’d be riding off into the twin sunsets _together_.

But Hux is regarding Ren as if he’s something that belongs to him, now. All tied up with a big fucking bow. “It will be far better and easier if I simply do not let you out of my sight, from now on. Agreed?”

He leans over and kisses Ren casually. 

“And as soon as we weigh anchor…” 

Hux picks up Ren’s hand and puts it over his own, perfectly thudding heart. Without the filter of the Force, everything’s less complicated, yet more intriguing; purer, yet more visceral. 

Being alive, really alive, suits them both. 

Hux favours Ren with a greedy smile. “…I'd like to thank you for my present.”


End file.
